A PSYCHOANALYTIC READING IN TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED: TRAUMA, HYSTERIA ...

European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies

Vol.7, No.4, pp.48-54, July 2019

Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK ()

A PSYCHOANALYTIC READING IN TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED: TRAUMA,

HYSTERIA AND ELECTRA COMPLEX

Sufyan AL-Dmour

ABSTRACT: Psychoanalysis seems to be the most suitable approach to analyze and interpret

Toni Morrison's Beloved. Freud is the founder of this theory in which he was able to explain

human behavior through dreams and unconscious symptoms. Beloved is recognized as one of

the most modern novels to apply psychoanalysis theories. In this research, I am going to

explain these theories in the novel through characters and some important incidents that

occurred in a great part of the novel. Sethe is the central character in the novel , she was

influenced by her actions, especially killing her innocent daughter. It was evident that she had

experienced a harsh treatment in her past. She suffers from slavery, oppression and raping in

Mr.Garner Sweet Home in Kentucky. Trauma, hysteria, Oedipal complex are very clear to

readers as psychological symptoms in Beloved. Many critics have written and discussed the

theories of psychoanalysis in the novel such as Kristin Boudreau in her article "Pain and the

unmaking of self in Toni Morrison's Beloved". She asserted that" People attempted to find an

outlet to help them to clear out their painful experiences and hurtful past". Sethe released her

negative emotions and her stored desires by killing her innocent daughter. In the end, Many

readers believe Morrison's novels are the establishment of her envisioned tradition. She

challenges and requires the reader to accept her on her own terms.

KEYWORDS: psychoanalysis, sethe, hysteria, slavery, oedipal complex, holocaust

Psychoanalysis in literature builds on Freud theories of psychology, which help readers simply

interpret literary texts. Typically, Freud encourages his patients to talk freely on his famous

couch regarding their symptoms and to describe exactly what was on their mind. Freud was the

pioneer of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and also a theory which explains

human behavior. He believes that the unconscious mind is the storehouse for hidden desires,

emotions, ambitions, and fears (Bressler 90). This school of literary criticism asserts that we

can read literature by applying the methods of psychoanalysis both to literary characters and

their authors. This could be by treating the work like a dream and interpreting the content to

uncover the hidden meaning, fulfilled through a close analysis of the language and symbolism.

Morrison's Beloved is recognized as one of the most successful novels in the Afro-American

literature. A writer who is compared to other great novelists such as, William Faulkner and

others. She became the first African American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993

for her novel Beloved. Morrison is the one who helped bring African American literature and

culture into the recognition of the mainstream reader, through her fictions.

My research focuses on the psychoanalytic theories that help interpret and explain Toni

Morrison's Beloved. A question centered on my head: Is psychoanalysis the best way to

understand the message of the writer? The novel tells the story of a black girl who suffers from

slavery in Mr. Garner Sweet Home in Kentucky.She escaped to Cincinnati as a result of the

oppression she had suffered there. After 28 days of freedom, a group arrives to take back her

and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave slave owners the right to pursue

slaves across the state. She killed her unnamed daughter because she was afraid of slavery in

48

Print ISSN: 2055-0138(Print), Online ISSN: 2055-0146(Online)

European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies

Vol.7, No.4, pp.48-54, July 2019

Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK ()

Sweet House especially after the death of Mr. Garner and the cruel rulings of Mrs.Garner

brother School teacher.

Readers of Beloved may use psychoanalysis to better understand the thoughts and actions of

its characters, many of which could be considered deeply psychologically disturbed.

Regardless of the reader's strategy, examining Beloved through psychological symptoms will

undoubtedly shed some amount of light on the complicated relationships and philosophical

nature of the novel.

The main subject that would be discussed through a psychoanalytical approach would be the

part of the novel where Sethe murders her baby. This act demonstrates in the most awful way

just how bad slavery must have been to the African Americans. If a woman was to cut the

throat of her own child, the mind of that woman had to have been severely damaged. This

incident also allows the reader to enter the mind of Sethe and attempt to not only imagine her

position but consider it. In other words, the way Morrison explains slavery forces the reader

to feel evil for Sethe, not see her as a murderer. It can be possible through Sethe asks the ghost

for forgiveness, and she thought that she by killing her, she is protecting her from being a slave

and raped. The psychoanalytical approach could be then further related to the other important

aspects of the novel.

Moreover ,Feng Yi contends in his study Dramatizing Trauma in Resistance to Postcolonial

Hegemonic Culture that : "Toni Morrison did not stop at depicting the traumas, she in fact used

magical techniques to bring the dead back to the world to dramatize the traumas and focused

on the causes for these traumas, that was, the hegemonic culture in colonialism and postcolonialism countries¡­"(Feng 10). When Paul D saw Sethe's scars on her body that take the

shape of a chokecherry tree, he reflects how harsh life with them at Sweet Home. Thus, trees

had different images in the novel. Schoolteacher's men bind, burn, and shoot Sixo near the trees

that he and Paul D found trusting and inviting. And while trees bear the blossoms that lead Paul

D to freedom in Chapter 10, they also bear the killing victims that haunt Sethe's memory. Paul

D regards Sethe's scar--tissue tree with irony. Since white men have reimagined trees as sites

of brutality, thinks Paul D, Sethe cannot pretense the ugliness and brutality of her wounds by

seeing her scars as a tree.

The unconscious is believed to be the most important Freudian contribution to psychoanalysis,

and it has to be connected with the idea of repression which serves as a cover for the

unconscious wishes and traumas. For this reason, the symptoms reveal the repressed

unconscious. Toni Morrison focuses on social trauma caused by racial repression that black

African citizens suffer from in America.Sethe the protagonist was born in the south to an

African mother she never knew, she is sold to the Garners who practice benevolent kind of

slavery on her, especially, when Mrs. Garner appointed her sadistic brother-in-law after the

death of Mr. Garner. A place where children are not allowed to be with their mothers and used

to call all black women Mamma. Also, a place where you have to pay in order to be free.Halle

had to work every Friday in order to have the that has managed him to replace his old mother

Baby Suggs by Sethe. Blacks were treated like animals which live better than them in Sweet

Home.This quote explains what Sweet Home means to them or how it becomes after the death

of Mr.Garner " if you go there, and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will

be there . . . it's going to always be there waiting for you (Morrison 18). Filiz Korez is another

researcher who published a psychoanalytical study about Beloved, he elaborates the effect of

49

Print ISSN: 2055-0138(Print), Online ISSN: 2055-0146(Online)

European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies

Vol.7, No.4, pp.48-54, July 2019

Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK ()

repression through the novel. He thinks that: "The return of the repressed marks the process in

which the repressed events and memories reawakened. The arrival of Paul D from the Kentucky

plantation called Sweet Home, reappearance of Beloved are signs of the return of the repressed

for Sethe"( Kortez 82). As Paul D arrived at 124, Sethe remembered the cruel incident that

happened with her in Sweet Home particularly when the nephews of school teacher milked her

by force. Beloved as well compelled her to remember her painful past. Hence, Kortez highlights

that Beloved and Paul D links her present with her past while Denver serves to link her present

with her future ( Kortez 85).

Another analytical point of view comes from Deborah Ayer Sitter in her essay "The Making of

a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved". She explains: "The book was not about the institution

¨CSlavery with a capital S.It was about these anonymous people called slaves. What they do to

keep on, how they make a living, how they are willing to risk and however it lasts "(Sitter 17).

As Sethe ran from Sweet Home, School Teacher and his nephews; Slave Catcher, the Sheriff,

and four horsemen were following her.She cuts her daughter's throat and tried to kill her boys

Bulgar and Howard and to throw Denver against the wall. It is obvious that Blacks do not have

the right to read or to know what happens around them daily, they are existed only to serve

whites and to get punished by them.In the novel, Stamp Paid read in a newspaper that Sethe

has killed her daughter and her picture was in the newspaper. Also, Sethe believes that she did

the right thing instead of being under School Teacher rules. In consequence, Sitter adds: "When

Paul D and Sethe lie side by side in resentful rejection of each other, what is rejected is much

more than the shape of the scar on a woman's back. Morrison places their present experience

in the context of their past, introduced through their memories of Sweet Home¡­"( Sitter 22).

Furthermore, Freud thinks that the unresolved conflicts give rise to neurosis to constitute itself

in literature. He asserted that "A work of literature is the external expression of the author's

unconscious mind, and he depends on these techniques to allow the reader uncover his hidden

motivations, desires and wishes"(Bressler 91). By considering the life of Toni Morrison, it will

help to understand the motives and the impulses of the writer. First of all, Toni Morrison's

original name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, after eighteen years, she has decided to change it

to Toni which appears to be a masculine name. She wanted a powerful name instead of a frail,

weak and feminine name. She insisted to throw behind her back the Women's role, and act like

a man. Secondly, in reference to her marital life, she has got divorced after six years of marriage

while she was pregnant with her second child. Hence, she forced to live single with her two

children. Morrison transports this experience in her novel to Beloved who appears as a

separated child by her parents. Thirdly, the writer's family experience where they had to move

from Ohio due to the racial segregation that they exposed to. In Beloved, Morrison discloses

that the violence within Black American communities is originally imposed from outside by

white oppressors, whose search for victims within the black community. She is writing a book

of remedial - making us look directly at extensive horrors related to slavery in order to have

us, the reader, confront it and deal with it, and find solutions for it.

Hysteria is one of the neurosis diseases that hit the European and American societies in the

20th century as a consequence of boredom, ennui, depression, and oppression. Emma Parker

elaborates in her article ''History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison's Beloved'' that: ''Freud and

Breuer view hysteria as an organic physical illness and it needed to be understood as a psychic

disorder. They proposed that hysteria is the product of a traumatic event that is excluded from

consciousness"(Parker 2). Therefore, hysteria represents hostility and desire transformed into

50

Print ISSN: 2055-0138(Print), Online ISSN: 2055-0146(Online)

European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies

Vol.7, No.4, pp.48-54, July 2019

Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK ()

physical symptoms such as coughs, convulsions, limps, linguist distortion. Sethe hysteria is

confirmed by her actions in the exorcism scene, where she attacks the white liberal man,

Edward Bodwin. This incident serves as a cure to Sethe past memory {trauma} since Beloved

disappeared after this scene immediately. In addition, Bodwin returns to take Denver to work

in the same way that schoolteacher has dealt with Sethe, but she was aware, instead of killing

her, she flies at Bodwin with an Ice Pick. When Denver explains what is happening in her

house she says: "Sethe has lost her wits"(Morrison 254). Parker also contends: "The conviction

of Freud and Breuer that "Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences"(2:7)confirms that

hysteria functions as a useful conceptual tool in reading a novel that concerns what Morrison

calls remotely"(Ibid). This supports the idea when Paul D remembered his brothers Paul A and

Paul F and at the same time, he could not remember his mother and his father. He remembers

his friend Sixo where they captured by a large group of men with their guns. Sixo started to

sing and he never stopped singing, school teacher did not accept his voice, he orders his men

to shoot him .

Kristin Bourdeau is one of the first critics to address the psychoanalysis of Toni Morrison's

Beloved. She discussed in her article "Pain and the Unmaking of Self in Toni Morrison

Beloved" the slavery issues that have a great impact on African ¨CAmerican people, and how

they release their anger and oppression they are exposed to. She raised the question, "Can one

be fully human without having suffered"(Boudreau 41). This article most certainly takes on a

psychoanalytical approach to the novel. People attempted to find an outlet to help them to clear

out their painful experiences and hurtful past. Sethe released her negative emotions and her

stored desires by killing her innocent daughter. She reflects her pain at the end of the novel to

Mr.Bodwin who she thinks him as a school teacher. She tells Beloved every day about the

horror of slavery and she insists on Denver to never experience what she has faced in Sweet

Home. Bourdeau clears out at the end of her essay:

Pain, cannot make us real: if empirical reality is reserved for (re)memory and desire, it can,

like the acknowledgment of a self's existence, be revoked at any time. The most pain can do,

as the novel suggests, is call attention to the violent and necessary process whereby self is

constructed by others. If we choose to seize on more attractive versions of self and believe

them to be "real" or, in the romantic account, "fully human"-we take the dangerous risk, in

Emerson's words,

of " courting suffering" in order to verify our humanity (Bourdeau19).

On the other hand, Lyunolu Osagie explains in his Article "psychoanalytic strategies in

Beloved" There is plenty of evidence for the reading public to assume that Beloved is a ghost

returned in human form, and at the end of the novel no one knows what happened with her

"(Osagie 4). There are many clues in the novel which stands with the inference that Beloved is

a ghost that controls 124.At first, Beloved from her appearance to Sethe and Paul D, she tried

to be close to Sethe and lately she became obsessed with her.Besides, the girl name is Beloved

with no last name, she comes from water and asks for sweet in which Sethe tortured and killed

her.Another sign which strongly supports this outcome that the dog which was crippled by the

ghost at the first chapter has been disappeared and never back till Beloved disappeared in the

end. Additionally, Sethe explains to the ghost the reasons behind killing her, she thinks that

she can be her mother for the second time. The most remarkable example of Morrison's

intelligence in this novel is her treatment of the adult ghost. The reader logically is suspicious

of this new Beloved, who may be Sethe's slain infant somehow brought to life, but the

characters treat her as real. Fear, guilt, shame, and self-loathing live in Sethe's mind and heart,

51

Print ISSN: 2055-0138(Print), Online ISSN: 2055-0146(Online)

European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies

Vol.7, No.4, pp.48-54, July 2019

Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK ()

and Beloved lives for the reader. The reader can never be sure, even after Beloved vanishes, if

she is flesh or spirit and so shares Sethe's self-doubt.

What is more evident in Morrison's masterpiece that there is a clear response from the slaves

to slavery in Sweet Home, which approves their search for a change in their personality in order

to stand against whites' abuse. That's what motivates Virginia Costello to explain on her

dissertation "Creation of Self and Personalism in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and

Beloved". The author has focused on her study on Emmanuel Mounier's Philosophy

Personalism. She clarifies: "Personalism requires individuals to take responsibility for their

actions and for the evils of the world as much as they are able. Before these characters reach

personalism, they create themselves: they take responsibility for themselves, their actions, and

their growth" (Costello 6). In the novel, slaves were oppressed by the whites' society in Sweet

Home, and even the name of the farm was hurtful to them instead of being blessed and valuable.

Virginia Costello states:

In Beloved, slave owners and overseers violate the bodies and souls of their

slaves. In response, these slaves both commit murder and help others heal.

After slavery, ex-slaves accept and deny their past, their emotions, and their

reactions to physical and psychological abuse. They struggle, fail, and retreat

into self-imposed isolation. However, by the end of the novel all the major

characters have created themselves and many hold personalist values.

In both novels, the major female characters do not directly move from

passive, victimized beings to personalist characters. They create and un-create

themselves. Some step beyond creating themselves and, without recognizing it

as such, move toward personalism. The characters who turn away from

personalism regress into isolation, stagnancy, and self-abasement. Those who

move toward it find connections with others, growth and self-worth (Costello 14).

The Holocaust is an essential event in the history of European culture. About six million Jews

were killed by Nazi Germany during World War II, 1.5million of them were children. Toni

Morrison opens up her novel with the following words: "Sixty Million and more " to remind

us of the effects of this incident in our lives today.She exploits this historical event to refer to

the historical value of slavery in America. There is a parallel experience between Sethe and the

people who suffered from the Holocaust. She will never get away the experience through

memory. The best she can do is to protect her children from reliving the same pain.On the other

hand, Nathalie Segeral on her essay "Reclaimed Experience: Gendering Trauma in Slavery,

Holocaust, and Madness Narratives" claims that:'' Jewish women were targeted by Nazis

because they were viewed as threatening in their capacity to bear children. Contrary to slavery

in which the female slaves were viewed by the plantation owner as productive property and

had to suffer from repeated rapes by her owner"( Several 91). Ethe was a slave who lived in

Sweet Home and a by Mr.Garner. When she fled from the plantation, she was pregnant with

Denver. School teacher and his nephews captured her and whipped her on her back and took

her milk. Several clarifies that: "Jewish women were victimized precisely for their reproductive

capacity, were sterilized when not gassed immediately, and mothers and children have always

killed fir intercourse between a Jewish person and a non-Jew"(Ibid). So that, Slavery and

Holocaust are all similar in that they ruined the lives of those who directly experienced the

terror and horror.

52

Print ISSN: 2055-0138(Print), Online ISSN: 2055-0146(Online)

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download